Acedia's Resistance On The Demands of Love - Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

Forthcoming in Virtue and Their Vices, ed.
Kevin Timpe and Craig Boyd, Oxford UP
The Vice of Sloth:

Some Historical Reflections on Laziness, Effort,
and Resistance to the Demands of Love1
Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Calvin College
Introduction
Many contemporary people, scholars and non-scholars alike, think of the deadly sin of
sloth as ‘mere’ laziness. In the words of Evelyn Waugh,
[“Sloth”] is a mildly facetious variant of “indolence,” and indolence,

surely, so far from being a deadly sin, is one of the world’s most amiable of
weaknesses. Most of the world’s troubles seem to come from people who are too
busy. If only politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should
all be. The lazy [person] is preserved from the commission of almost all the
nastier crimes.2
Similarly, Wendy Wasserstein’s recent book on sloth uses a conception of sloth as laziness and
sheer inertia to construct a delightful parody of self-help literature. From the front cover:
With tongue in cheek, Sloth guides readers step-by-step toward a life of non-
committal inertia. “You have the right to be lazy,” writes Wasserstein. “You can
choose not to respond. You can choose not to move.” Readers will find out the
importance of Lethargiosis—the process of eliminating energy and drive, the vital
first step in becoming a sloth. To help you attain the perfect state of indolent bliss,
the book offers a wealth of self-help aids. Readers will find the sloth songbook,
sloth breakfast bars (packed with sugar, additives, and a delicious touch of
Ambien), sloth documentaries (such as the author’s 12-hour epic on Thomas
Aquinas), and the sloth network, channel 823, programming designed not to
stimulate or challenge in any way.3
1
Some material from this essay was originally published in The Other Journal 15:10
(2007). It is reprinted here with the editor’s permission.

2
Evelyn Waugh, London Sunday Times, 1962 (reprinted in The Seven Deadly Sins
[Pleasantville, NY: Akadine Press, 2002], p. 57).

3
Wasserstein, Sloth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
1
Forthcoming in Virtue and Their Vices, ed. Kevin Timpe and Craig Boyd, Oxford UP
In Harper’s 1987 advertising spoofs of the deadly sins, the caption of the ad for sloth
read, ‘If sloth had been the original sin, we’d all still be in paradise.’ Thomas Pynchon concurs:
‘Any discussion of Sloth in the present day is of course incomplete without considering
television, with its gifts of paralysis… Tales spun in idleness find us tubeside, supine,
chiropractic fodder, sucking it all in.’4 From scholarly to popular accounts of the vice,
contemporary culture seems often to associate sloth with laziness, inactivity, and inertia.
Looking back through sloth’s long history in the Christian tradition of spiritual and moral
formation, it is striking how far the contemporary conception departs from sloth’s original
spiritual roots. Retrieving the traditional definition of sloth will help us see how we now tend to
mistake sloth’s symptoms for ostensible virtues, and how sloth has more to do with being lazy
about love than lazy about our work.
Part I: Sloth and Work
The Traditional Conception
The first people to articulate a conception of sloth as a capital vice5 were the Desert
4
Pynchon’s essay is found in Wicked Pleasures: Meditations on the Seven “Deadly”
Sins, ed. Robert C. Solomon (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 84-5.
5
Capital vices are defined in the tradition as vices which serve as fertile sources of other
characteristic vices. They serve as final causes, orienting the person to a false conception of
happiness and organizing patterns of thought, desire, and action around that end. The list of
seven (or eight) vices was later designated the seven deadly sins, but this title has a different
meaning, since ‘deadly’ refers to the distinction in Catholic moral theology between mortal and
venial sin. Writers on the sins such as Thomas Aquinas deny that every act of a particular vice
2
Fathers of the Egyptian wilderness in the 4th century A.D. These monks retreated from the world
into the desert deliberately to face what they called ‘demons’ or ‘evil thoughts,’ following the
example of Jesus’ time of temptation in the gospel accounts (e.g., Matthew 4 and Luke 4). The
list of evil thoughts set down by Evagrius of Pontus (345-399) included eight members: gluttony,
lust, avarice, anger, sorrow, sloth [acedia6], vainglory, and pride.7 After many years of anchoritic
life, Evagrius left behind a written record of the practices and teachings of these desert hermits.
In his colorful account of sloth, he describes it in terms of distaste, disgust, sorrow,
oppressiveness, and restlessness:
The demon of acedia…instills in [the monk] a dislike for the place [that is, his
desert cell] and for his state of life itself…[The demon] joins to these suggestions
the memory of [the monk’s] close relations and of his former life; he depicts for
him the long course of his lifetime, while bringing the burdens of asceticism
before his eyes; and, as the saying has it, he deploys every device in order to have
the monk leave his cell and flee the stadium.8
necessarily constitutes a mortal sin, although the cumulative effect of the vices are to cut one off
from God as one’s ultimate end. See chapter 1 of my Glittering Vices (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos
2009), for a fuller discussion of the difference.

6
The term is from the Greek a-kedeia (literally, “lack of care”), but in the Latin and early
English the vice is usually referred to as acedia, accidie, or similar variants.

7
See, for example, Thoughts, Eight Thoughts, Praktikos.6 in Evagrius of Pontus: The
Greek Ascetic Corpus, trans. R Sinkewicz, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003). All future references to Evagrian texts are from this volume.
8
Praktikos VI.12. Acedia (alternately, akedia or accidie) comes from the Greek, a-
kedeia, meaning ‘lack of care.’
3
Throughout Evagrius’s account (only briefly represented here), two things are evident: First, he
takes sloth to be an extremely powerful and serious vice, ‘the most oppressive of all the
demons’9; a vice ‘accustomed to enveloping the whole soul and strangling the mind.’10 It is a
serious vice because one’s entire commitment of one’s life to God is at stake; sloth essentially
concerns one’s fundamental commitment to one’s spiritual identity and vocation. The ‘stadium’
or gladiatorial arena in the above quotation refers to the metaphorical place where the monk as
an ‘athlete of Christ’ did battle with sin and temptation in order to achieve the tranquility needed
for contemplative prayer. To ‘leave the cell’ or ‘flee the stadium’ thus signifies an abandonment
of one’s fundamental calling as a monk.Secondly, because of this subject matter, sloth also
qualifies as a spiritual vice. It involves inner resistance and coldness toward one’s spiritual
vocation and the practices that embody and sustain it. In Evagrius’s and Cassian’s concatenations
of the vices, sloth was on the spiritual end of the chain near vainglory and pride, and opposite
‘carnal vices’ such as gluttony and lust.11
In the writings of Evagrius’s disciple, John Cassian (360-433? AD), we see a shift in
emphasis toward the external manifestation of the inner resistance characteristic of sloth. Cassian
transplanted desert asceticism into the Latin West, establishing communal forms of monasticism
more familiar to us today. Each monk was expected to contribute to the spiritual and physical
9
Praktikos, ‘One hundred chapters,’ 12 and 28.
10
Praktikos, ‘One hundred chapters,’ 36.
11
Carnal vices have a bodily or material good as their object (e.g., the pleasure of eating
or drinking, sensations of sexual pleasure, money—although avarice can be a complicated case);
spiritual vices have a spiritual or intelligible good (e.g., honor, excellence, glory, superior worth
or rank) as their object.
4
well-being of the community. Although the Desert Fathers also emphasized the spiritual
importance of manual labor, they did not associate it primarily with sloth as Cassian did. Cassian
explicitly and extensively discusses the importance of manual labor as a remedy for sloth. Early
on in its history, then, sloth picked up its association with physical inactivity and shirking
manual labor. Cassian uses language such as ‘laziness,’ ‘sluggishness,’ ‘sleepiness,’ ‘inertia,’
and ‘lack of effort’ in his descriptions of sloth.12 For example, ‘[Monks] overcome by
slumbering idleness and acedia…[have] chosen to be clothed not by the effort of [their] own toil
but in the rags of laziness…[and] have grown remiss as a result of sluggishness and…are
unwilling to support themselves by manual labor.’13
Even for Cassian, however, idleness is clearly intended to be symptomatic of the inner
condition of one besieged by sloth.14 In this Cassian’s own description echoes what we have seen
from Evagrius: ‘Once [acedia] has seized possession of a wretched mind, it makes a person
12
See also Evagrius: ‘Acedia is…hatred of industriousness, a battle against
stillness,…laziness in prayer, a slackening of ascesis, untimely drowsiness, revolving sleep’ (On
Vices 6.4, in Sinkewicz). His description in this passage is, however, complicated by other
features of the vice that accord better with the passage from Praktikos: ‘hatred of one’s cell, an
adversary of ascetic works, an opponent of perseverance,… a partaker in sorrow’ etc….

13
Institutes X.xxi, trans. B. Ramsey, O.P. Ancient Christian Writers 58 (Mahweh, NJ:
Newman Press, 2000). See also Conferences V, in volume 57 of the same series.
14
In fact, his long discussion of the apostle Paul’s words about idleness and work is
framed as a ‘health-giving remedy’ for maladies arising from ‘the spirit of acedia.’ Idleness is the
outer symptom, doing good work and not giving way to idleness is a remedial (and preventative)
practice. (Inst. X.vii.)
5
horrified at where he is, disgusted with his cell… Likewise it renders him slothful and immobile
in the face of all the work to be done within the walls of his dwelling.’15
Cassian’s description of physical inactivity or lack of effort is not a condemnation of
laziness as such, as shown by the approving summaries of Evagrius’s descriptions of acedia that
frame his own reflections in the Institutes. Slothful behavior is seen to be an effect or expression
of one’s spiritual state. Note that ‘the work to be done within the walls of his dwelling’ includes
both spiritual practices and physical duties done on behalf of the religious community. Shirking
this work in any form signals a distancing of oneself from one’s identity and investment as a
member of a spiritual community bound by its love for God. Mere (physical) laziness would not
necessarily be slothful. Rather, shirking one’s spiritual duty—whether this involves practices of
inner devotion or manual labor on behalf of one’s brothers in the monastery—is slothful when it
is symptomatic of inner discontent and resistance to the monk’s religious identity as a member of
the monastic community. Cassian likens the one with sloth to a deserter in an army who has
abandoned his loyalties and the cause for which he pledged to fight:
For the adversary [the devil] will the more frequently and harshly try a person
who he knows, once the battle is joined, will immediately offer him his back and
who he sees hopes for safety not in victory or in struggle but in flight, until he is
gradually drawn out of his cell and begins to forget the reason for his profession,
which is nothing other than the vision and contemplation of that divine purity
which is more excellent than anything else and which can be acquired only by
silence, by remaining constantly in one’s cell, and by meditation. Thus it is that
the soldier of Christ, having become a fugitive and a deserter from his army,
15
Praktikos VI.12.
6
“entangles himself in worldly affairs” and displeases “him to whom he engaged

himself” [quoting 2 Tim.2:4].16
Both inner and outer manifestations of sloth are thus linked to one’s religious commitment and
one’s attitude toward the demands of the spiritual life. Like Evagrius, Cassian thinks sloth is a
serious spiritual vice because it threatens one’s fundamental identity as one who has devoted
one’s life to developing a relationship with God and erodes one’s commitment to the religious
community formed by that that identity.17
16
Inst. X.iii. Given that desertion was typically punishable by execution, it is easy to see
how sloth also developed a reputation for being a mortal sin—one by which one forfeited one’s
spiritual life.
17
Originally, acedia and the vice of sorrow were distinguished from each other, but
linked in the concatenation of vices (Cassian especially subscribed to the view that falling prey
to one vice made one susceptible to the next one in the chain). Cassian and Evagrius describe
sorrow’s cause as excessive attachment to (or insufficient detachment from) worldly desires,
pleasures, and possessions. One’s religious commitment makes one unable to satisfy or attain
these desires, and one feels disappointed as a result. This is the vice of sorrow. (Thus Cassian
makes much of total renunciation: the monk cannot keep even a penny of his former fortune
when he joins the monastery; this in contrast to the Desert Fathers who were allowed a sub-
poverty level of personal possessions to maintain their livelihood—e.g., basket weaving
materials.) This sorrow in turn produces resentment of one’s religious vocation which now
presents itself as the major obstacle to the fulfillment of worldly desires. As such, the vocation
and its demands is resented and resisted. This is the vice of sloth. Gregory will later combine
sorrow and sloth under the title, tristitia, and Aquinas will describe sloth itself as an oppressive
7
Complicating the account further, sloth’s physical symptoms do not always include
laziness or inertia. One can avoid putting effort in one’s spiritual endeavors both by undue rest
(laziness) and by restless escapism (busyness). ‘For the person whom it has begun to conquer, to
whatever degree, it either allows to stay in his cell without any spiritual progress, in as it were a
state of inactivity and surrender, or drives him out from there and make him, in addition,
unstable and feckless.’18 Over-activity might involve an actual (literal) escape from one’s cell: so
Cassian exhorts the monk—as a soldier of Christ—not to be ‘a deserter and a fugitive’19 (note
again the idea of abandoning one’s spiritual vocation) and not to be ‘cut down by the sword of
sleep or collapse nor to be driven out from the bulwark of the monastery and depart in flight.’20
Besides actual escape, a mind actively engaged in denial and diversion in the form of
imaginative fantasy is another form of restless escapism. So Evagrius describes the slothful
monk in his solitary desert cell, imagining what a relief it would be to jump out of his cell and
flee.21 Later, Gregory the Great (540-604) and Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) described sloth’s
sorrow on the basis of this relationship. My account of sloth, based on Aquinas’s texts, also
maintains the link Evagrius and Cassian first described, with excessive attachment to the ‘old
self’ making commitment to and joy in the ‘new self’ difficult and distasteful.
18
Inst. X.vi.
19
Inst. X.xxv.
20
Inst. X.ii-v.
21
Praktikos VI: ‘The demon of acedia, also called the noonday demon (cf. Ps. 90:6), is
the most oppressive of all the demons… First of all, he makes it appear that the sun moves
slowly or not at all, and that the day seems to be fifty hours long. Then he compels the monk to
look constantly toward the windows, to jump out of the cell, to watch the sun to see how far it is
8
characteristic expression in terms of ‘the wandering of the mind after illicit things.’22 One
immediately thinks of Pascal’s reflections on ‘diversion’ in his Pensees as a modern expression
of sloth. For Pascal, as for the earlier Christian tradition, these diversions and distractions are
what we fill our lives and minds with to avoid facing the truth regarding who we are and what
we are called to be in relationship with God. The external symptoms—laziness and lack of effort
or restless activity—share a common root in one’s inner restlessness and discontent.
In contrast to sloth’s undue rest and/or restlessness, the monk was supposed to have a
whole-hearted commitment to God. This whole-hearted commitment led to real rest and peace on
the one hand—the counterpoint of laziness, which is a false kind of rest—and the willingness to
put real effort into one’s relationship with God on the other—the counterpoint of restless flitting
from the ninth hour, to look this way and that… And further he instills in him a dislike for the
place and for his state of life itself, for manual labor, and also the idea that love has disappeared
from among the brothers and there is no one to console him. And should there be someone who
has offended the monk, this too the demon uses to add further to his dislike (of the place). He
leads him on to the desire for other places where he can easily find the wherewithal to meet his
needs and pursue a trade that is easier and more productive; he adds that pleasing the Lord is not
a question of being in a particular place…and as the saying has it, he deploys every device in
order to have the monk leave his cell and flee the stadium.’ Also, in Eight Thoughts (in
Sinkewicz) 6.5 he says: ‘The spirit of acedia drives the monk out of his cell, but the monk who
possesses perseverance will ever cultivate stillness.’

22
Gregory, Moralia in Iob, 31.45.88 ff. Aquinas quotes him as an authority on the matter
at ST IIaIIae.35.4.obj and ad 2.
9
from one thing to another, which is a kind of false or shallow activity.
A Brief History of Sloth
So far, I have emphasized the distance between the ancient view of acedia as resistance
to one’s spiritual vocation and contemporary descriptions of sloth as mere laziness. Nevertheless,
we can still see continuity between this vice’s Christian origins and contemporary conceptions of
it if we trace the change historically. To make a very long story short, what happened was that
the concept of sloth was gradually stripped of its association with inner spiritual commitment. As
it secularized, what remained (mostly) was its most distinctive and characteristic outer
symptom—inertia, lethargy, lack of effort, or laziness.
As an additional complication, however, sloth’s second manifestation—restless
overactivity—split off and became, in certain respects, a virtue. The secularization of sloth went
hand in hand with what I will call the spiritualization of work. What follows is a brief story of
how this went.
Sloth was translated and transplanted from its application to desert and monastic
settings—with their narrower concept of religious vocation and identity—into the wider culture,
first with the popularization of Gregory the Great’s Moralia but most intentionally and
extensively after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. By the 13th century, Aquinas had extended
sloth’s application beyond those who took religious orders to everyone with the virtue of
charity—that is, everyone who had been baptized a Christian. With a little help from certain
Reformers, the concept of religious vocation was subsequently extended to apply to all forms of
work and labor—even household chores and ditch-digging. On this view, diligence in all work
could be a sign of one’s love and devotion for God (from the Latin, diligere, to love). Being
10
industrious was virtuous because the harder you chose to work, the more love and devotion you
showed.23
As the gradual secularization of the modern period infiltrated the workplace, the religious
sense of “vocation” waned. Work began to supplant religious identity as the source of individual
identity and worth. As work took on an identity-defining significance, it became the key to
meaning and fulfillment. Henry Ford stirringly expressed it this way, ‘There is no place in
civilization for the idler. None of us has any right to ease. Work is our sanity, our self-respect,
our salvation. Through work and work alone may health, wealth, and happiness inevitably be
secured.’24
The result for the vice of sloth? Josef Pieper writes:
In popular thought the “capital sin” of sloth revolves around the proverb, “An idle
mind is the Devil’s workshop.” According to this concept, sloth is the opposite of
diligence and industry; it is almost regarded as a synonym for laziness and
idleness. Consequently, [sloth] has become, to all practical purposes, a concept of
the middle class work ethic. The fact that it is numbered among the seven “capital
23
I have already noted connections to laziness in Cassian’s account of sloth, but I think
there is a larger story to be told about how the concept of sloth evolved toward secularization
during the Renaissance, Reformation, and Industrial Revolution up to the present. This history is
somewhat speculative on my part, but, nevertheless, I think, a plausible story and one worth
investigating further. For a further look at secular and religious views of sloth, see my
‘Resistance to the Demands of Love: A Reflection on the Vice of Sloth’ in the Calvin College
Spark (Spring 2005), available at www.calvin.edu/publications/spark/2005/spring/sloth.htm.

24
Quoted in Robert McCracken, What is Sin? What is Virtue? (New York: Harper and
Row, 1966), p. 29.
11
sins” seems, as it were, to confer the sanction and approval of religion on the
absence of leisure in the capitalistic industrial order.25
Laziness is a sign of lack of love and devotion to one’s work, where one’s career now
replaces religion as a source of identity, meaning, and fulfillment. Diligence and industriousness
are now virtues essential to a life of self-defined vocation and self-achieved fulfillment. As
William May puts it, from the Industrial Revolution until the 20th century, Western societies
‘shared confidence in the redemptive power of work,’ although the ‘religious significance’ with
which work has been ‘invested’ has taken different forms in capitalistic and communistic
societies.26 Very recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education listed discipline first among the
virtues necessary for success in graduate school.27 Diligence also has a common place among the
virtues included in “character building” curricula at all levels of education.28 In a culture devoted
to personal success and fulfillment through work, sloth functions in a parallel way to the original
25
Pieper, trans. McCarthy, On Hope (SanFrancisco: Ignatius, 1986), p. 54.
26
A Catalogue of Sins, William F. May (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967).
27
Thomas H. Benton, ‘The Top 5 Virtues of Successful Graduate Students’ Chronicle of
Higher Education (Sept 5, 2003; online at http://chronicle.com/article/The-5-Virtues-of-
Successful/5060/). Discipline is the first virtue he discusses, and that section begins with the
advice to ‘work every day if possible.’

28
See, for example, the list in Calvin College’s new curriculum. Diligence tops the list;
charity is also included later on. To be fair, the list is not meant to be rank-ordered, but it is
interesting that in making such lists, diligence obviously spring naturally to mind and has an
uncontested place.
12
conception—the slothful person is a psychological puzzle; she is a person who resists her
vocation, even though it is the key to her own happiness.
What should we make of this development in which sloth gets secularized and work gets
spiritualized? Because our own work is now the key to fulfillment, and our own efforts procure
success, the contemporary virtues of diligence and industriousness in our work can easily arise
from the vice pride, where we idolatrously try to forge our own identity, and determine and
procure our own happiness for ourselves. As in the traditional schema, pride is the primal source
of sin and the other capital vices emerge from it as so many branches growing from the same
tree, or, to switch metaphors, so many variations on a single theme. Like Augustine’s analysis of
Roman ‘courage’ and ‘moderation’ in City of God, many forms of contemporary diligence will
thus count as pseudo-virtues from the point of view of those who first named sloth as a vice,
because they are ultimately rooted in a self-love and presumption of dominion over our own
lives that neither acknowledges nor depends on God. Insofar as we assume our fulfillment to be
in our own power to determine and deliver, our character reveals its roots in pride. Insofar as
work has become an activity used to cover over our true spiritual vocation, it has become a new
form of slothful restlessness. Our brief history reveals a great irony, then: Judged by the
traditional conception of sloth, today’s moral ideal—the ‘virtuously’ industrious and diligent
worker—is just as likely as her lazy counterpart to be in the grip of the vice of sloth and its
traditional root, pride.
Unfortunately, this is not just a problem for those with a secular conception of work.
These tendencies also bleed into religious life and ministry. If diligence is the measure of love,
then the harder one works—this time in religious programs, in ministries, at volunteer
organizations, or through acts of charity—the better. Be ants, not sluggards, the proverb-writer
13
warns, and the apostle Paul insists that we work with our hands and eat only what we earn. But
all this diligent participation in religious work, ostensibly as a sign of devotion, can also subtly
slide into the vice of pride. In pride, we implicitly assume responsibility for creating our own
religious identity (as an ‘involved church member’ or ‘one devoted to the ministry’) or ensuring
that our own spiritual fulfillment lies safely within our own control, measured by our own
standards, and achieved by our own efforts. Our religious activities, even ministry itself, can
easily become something more like our own projects than anything like a response to God’s love
or calling. In this case, we’ve adopted the secular work model of identity and fulfillment and
developed our own prideful, ‘Christian’ version of it.
As an equally ironic result, religious activities can also function as just one more escapist,
diversionary cover-up for the vice of sloth itself, traditionally understood. That is, we can use
busy involvement in religious practices and programs to avoid giving ourselves in a real
relationship of love with God. Our lives can be filled with church committee work and social
groups and fundraisers, but empty of real relationship and worship—perhaps our frantic
busyness is a symptom of our lack of desire for God himself and a preference for our own self-
made kingdoms. Or worse, perhaps, worship itself becomes more self-entertainment than
encounter with God. In these religious contexts as well, then, while busy activities earn moral
approval or disguise a lack of serious discipleship, they can cover over the real vice of sloth.
Perhaps, for some, work is not identity-defining. In these cases, laziness may be nothing more
than having a little extra time on your hands. It is mere laziness rather than culpable inertia—
doing nothing rather than shirking duty; feeling relaxed rather than being apathetic when one
14
ought to feel devotion. No particular moral disapprobation need be attached to this sort of ‘mere
laziness’; it is no big deal to feel lazy occasionally.29
I do think it reveals the power of the ‘diligence-is-devotion’ paradigm that plenty of
people feel guilty admitting they spent an afternoon off relaxing, even if they cannot explain why
all laziness is bad. More importantly, however, our culturally pervasive disparagements of
laziness also seem to arise from and further preclude a real understanding of rest (physical and
spiritual) and an appreciation for its value, a point which we will come back to later. The
paradoxical result of the twists and turns of this brief history is that it makes sense for
contemporary people to be puzzled about why mere laziness should count as something like a
big, bad, deadly sin.30 It also makes sense of why a sort of idolatrous workaholism—both in
29
As Peter Kreeft once put it, ‘Sloth is not just laziness. There are two kinds of laziness,
the first of which is only mildly, or venially sinful, the second not a sin at all. Not working, or
not working hard at good and earthly necessary tasks is a venial sin. Preferring the pleasures of
resting to the sweat of needed labor is irresponsible and self-indulgent; but it is not the mortal sin
of sloth. Sloth refuses to work at our heavenly task. The second kind of laziness belongs to a
phlegmatic or slow temperament…“It’s a lazy afternoon in summer” is a kind of delight, and
sloth has no delight. Relaxing is not sloth. The person who never relaxes is not a saint but a
fidget’ (Back to Virtue, Nashville TN: Thomas Nelson, 1986, p. 155).

30
It should be noted that some people launching this criticism are using the term ‘deadly’
in an incoherent way: it is often used by secularists and Protestants who don’t believe,
respectively, in sin and hell or mortal sin. Hence my preference for the term ‘capital vice.’ See
previous note [5].
15
secular careers and in Christian ministry—is often honored as a virtue, with laziness its vicious
counterpart.
If there were no more to sloth than the sense purveyed by contemporary culture—that is,
if sloth is nothing but laziness—it would make sense to drop sloth off the list of seven capital
vices altogether, a now-inexplicable remnant of a no-longer-applicable tradition. If, however, we
take a more historical view of sloth—in which its relationship to religious vocation has been
successfully secularized—we need to face the important question of whether and in what
respects we should now understand work, diligence, laziness, and sloth as virtues or vices. The
point of learning the whole story of sloth, including its roots in the Christian tradition, is in part
to reveal these paradoxes and contemporary moral dangers and to help us sort through them with
some healthy, perhaps countercultural Christian wisdom.
There is, however, another side to this project of bringing traditional understandings of
sloth to bear on contemporary life. That is, there is another important way the traditional notion
of sloth and its symptoms (laziness and restlessness) has diagnostic and remedial usefulness
today. The second case I want to make for the retrieval of the traditional conception of sloth and
its translation into contemporary contexts requires attention to sloth’s relational component and
in particular, its link to love. To make this point, I need to explain briefly Thomas Aquinas’s
definition of charity, the virtue of love which stands opposed to the vice of sloth.31
Part II: Sloth and Love
Aquinas on Sloth and Charity
31
See chapter [XX] in this volume for a discussion by Paul Wadell on the virtue of
charity.
16
To understand sloth’s link to love, we need to understand the context in which Aquinas
gives his account of the vice.32 Unlike many prominent figures in the vices tradition, Aquinas
does not organize the Summa theologiae around a list of seven virtues and a parallel list of seven
vices. Rather, he makes the seven principal virtues the backbone of the Summa’s structure, and
then includes other elements—the seven capital vices, the beatitudes, the gifts of the Holy
Spirit—wherever they fit among those seven.33 First, he discusses the theological virtues—faith,
hope, and charity (or love)—and then the four cardinal virtues—prudence, justice, courage, and
temperance. Because the list of seven principle virtues does not correspond to the list of seven
(or eight) capital vices, it is an interesting exercise to assess the significance of Aquinas’s
32
Aquinas’s account of sloth generally follows the Evagrian/Cassianic conception of
acedia. The list of seven deadly sins was originally a list of eight or nine. Gregory the Great
organized it into ‘the perfect seven’ by combining the vices of acedia and sorrow and making the
vice of pride the root of the seven remaining vices, rather than an additional item on the list. As
we will see shortly in his definition of sloth, Aquinas accepts Gregory’s combination but calls
the vices acedia instead of tristitia.

33
De Malo is organized by the vices, in Gregorian order (see Gregory the Great’s
Moralia in Iob 31.45.87ff.) The different format occasionally leads to different content: for
example, Aquinas has a long argument against usury in the question on avarice in De Malo,
where he argues that usury, as an act of avarice, undermines the strict obligations of justice. In
the Summa, he opposes covetousness or avarice to liberality (generosity), which is related to
justice, but not a strict requirement of it. Both are late works representing Aquinas’s mature
thought. The treatment of sloth is largely the same in ST and DM, but only in ST is sloth’s
relation to charity structurally evident, rather than (as in DM) simply asserted.
17
assignment of each vice to a particular virtue.34 Sloth is the capital vice opposed to the
theological virtue of charity—which Aquinas places at the center of his account of the virtues as
the ‘root and mother’ of all others in their true and perfect form.35 Charity (caritas, the Latin
equivalent for Greek agape) has a two-fold act: love of God, its principal act, and love of
neighbor for God’s sake, its secondary act. Sloth opposes charity’s love of God.36 Technically,
34
For example, lust is opposed to chastity, pride to humility, and wrath to patience. None
of these are on the list of the seven principal virtues. Sloth is sometimes opposed to
perseverance, but Aquinas opposes it to charity; vainglory has no clear opposing virtue, but
Aquinas’s opposes it to a subsidiary virtue of courage called ‘magnanimity.’

35
ST IIaIIae.23.8. This means that charity orders all other virtues to its end, love of God.
For a more detailed exposition of Aquinas’s view of sloth and the interpretive puzzles that arise
from it, see my ‘Resistance to the Demands of Love: Aquinas on the Vice of Acedia’ Thomist
68:2 (April 2004): 173-204, and “Aquinas on the Vice of Sloth: Three Interpretive Issues”
Thomist, forthcoming.
36
Envy, the other capital vice opposed to charity, opposes charity’s love of neighbor. In
the Summa, vices are usually organized in Aristotelian fashion according the virtue they oppose
either by excess or deficiency. Rather than defining sloth as a vice of deficiency with respect to
love for God, however (pace Dante and William Peraldus), Aquinas does not mention the
Aristotelian categories at all in his account. It would make sense to downplay them, given that he
says that there is no possible excess of charity. Thus all sins and vices are deficiencies of charity
in some way or other.
18
sloth is defined as a form of sorrow opposed to the main effect of love, which is joy in the
presence of the beloved, God, as illustrated in Figure 1, below:37
Figure 1
The virtue The principal act The effects
Charity Chief act (of the will): Inner effects: Joy, peace,
to Love and misericordia
Joy opposed to Sorrow (Sloth)
For Aquinas, ‘sorrow’ is a technical term (already used in Gregory, Cassian, and
Evagrius), meaning something quite different than simply feeling unhappy. Sorrow, understood
as a passion of the sensory appetite, is a response of feeling overwhelmed by a present evil. The
sort of sorrow Aquinas uses to define sloth, however, is a movement of the will analogous to, but
not identical with (or reducible to) the passion of sorrow in the sense appetite. Slothful sorrow’s
location in the will explains its opposition to charity, which is also a movement of the will, since
Aquinas defines this love as an act of the rational appetite. Unlike the sense appetite, the will
does not merely respond to external stimuli, but is capable of deliberate choice and self-direction.
The rational appetite can also respond to goods that can be apprehended by reason, such as the
37
The other two inner effects of charity are peace (concord of wills) and misericordia
(often translated mercy, but something more like sympathy or compassion—fellow-feeling). The
friendship of charity is therefore characterized by likeness: of nature—love is a natural
inclination toward and delight in what we have an affinity for—Aquinas calls this
‘connaturality,’ which is marked by joy; —of will, which is marked by peace; —and of feeling
(sym-pathos, com-passio), which is marked by misericordia.
19
good of a relationship or friendship, and is not limited to goods apprehensible by the senses (as is
true for the sense appetite).
How does this distinction help us understand sloth? Aquinas means by slothful ‘sorrow’ a
deliberate resistance or aversion of the will not just felt but endorsed or consented to. In one
place he even describes sloth as ‘detestation, disgust, and horror.’38 What causes this aversion of
the will? Aquinas says the object of the slothful person’s aversion is ‘the divine good in us.’39
This may initially sound somewhat mysterious, but when readers of the Summa heard the phrase,
‘the divine good in us,’ they would have immediately understand it as referring to what Aquinas
had just said in the questions on charity: The ‘divine good in us’ is our participation in God’s
nature through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit by grace. As he says in his description of
charity,
Charity is a friendship of human beings for God, founded upon the fellowship of
everlasting happiness. Now this fellowship is due to not natural powers but a gift
of grace (as according to Romans 6:23), so charity surpasses our natural
capacities…Therefore charity cannot be in us naturally, nor is it something we
acquire by human natural powers; it can only be in us by the infusion of the Holy
Spirit, Who is the Love of the Father and the Son. Created charity just is this
participation of the Holy Spirit in us.40
Roughly translated, this means that by grace, the Holy Spirit in our hearts makes us like-natured
with God. This likeness of nature is the foundation of our relationship with God, which Aquinas
calls the friendship of charity. Aquinas’s account of the virtue of Christian love for God turns out
to be an interesting combination of Platonic participation in the divine nature and Aristotelian
virtue friendship, where the friends love each other as persons with the same good nature (or
38
ST IIaIIae.35.2, DM 11.2.
39
DM 11.2.
40
ST IIaIIae.23.2.
20
character) as themselves. This friendship constitutes human fulfillment; this relationship of love
we have with God is our end and highest good.
So charity is a friendship with God, a love for the one with whom we become like-
natured. Sloth is sorrow or resistance to that friendship. Put more technically, sloth is the will’s
aversion to our ‘participation’ in God—that is, our resistance to his making us ‘like-natured’ to
him through the Holy Spirit’s presence and work within us, and thus our resistance to the
friendship and love grounded in that likeness of nature. Charity’s joy at our sharing in God’s
nature, conceived of as our greatest good, is replaced by distaste for and aversion to it as
something evil or to be avoided.
Aquinas thus agrees with Evagrius, Cassian, and Gregory the Great that sloth is a
spiritual vice, not a carnal one.41 Sloth’s main target is our love relationship with God, in the
context of a life in which we take our likeness to God to be our defining identity and loving
communion with God to be our main vocation as human beings. The slothful person resists this
relationship and the like-naturedness to God that she must accept and cultivate to sustain it. Sloth
is not, therefore, an aversion to physical effort per se; sloth is not merely the excessive desire for
physical ease or bodily comfort, the way the carnal vice of lust draws us away from God on
account of our desire for sexual pleasure. Nevertheless, sloth is still a resistance to effort and a
kind of inertia. It is laziness about love for God and what this love relationship requires of its
participants. Because we are embodied creatures, and our love and worship for God must also
take the form of bodily, outward actions, living out a relationship of love will often take physical
form and require physical effort. The key is not to mistake the expression of sloth for its spiritual
root.
41
ST IIaIIae.35.2.
21
There is a difficulty with Aquinas’s definition, however. A love relationship with God
constitutes human fulfillment, and human fulfillment is something we are naturally wired to
seek. As Augustine put it, ‘our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.’42 How then can our
will be slothful, shrinking back in aversion from the only thing that can fulfill us as if it were
evil?
Aquinas’s answer to this psychological puzzle is equally puzzling—at least initially. He
quotes the apostle Paul: the slothful person resists human fulfillment ‘on account of the flesh
utterly prevailing over the spirit.’43 ‘The flesh utterly prevailing over the spirit’ initially makes
sloth sound like a carnal vice again, as if the slothful person resisted her spiritual good because
desires for the comforts of the flesh won her over and tempted her away.
Of course Aquinas cannot endorse that interpretation of Paul, because he just denied that
sloth was a carnal vice whose object was bodily pleasure and comfort. What he means, therefore,
is what Paul also means: the flesh is not to be equated with the physical body, but instead, the
sinful nature, which Paul calls the ‘old self.’ Likewise, the spirit includes all of our redeemed,
regenerated nature. This he calls the ‘new self.’ Paul’s distinction applies to the whole person, in
all of her bodily and spiritual aspects; he is after the difference between a person enslaved to sin,
on the one hand, and a person devoted to God, on the other.44
How does this help us solve the puzzle about sloth? Sloth is resistance—not of bodily
flesh to spirit—but of the old sinful tendencies and desires and attachments to the new ones we
42
Confessions I.i.
43
Gal. 5:17, ST 35.3.
44
Aquinas makes this distinction in his commentary on Ephesians 4; see also Evagrius,
Thoughts 39 (in Sinkewicz) on Colossians 3.
22
adopt to become more faithful to Christ and like-natured to him. This transformation of the
person is nothing but sanctification—the transformation that is the essential work of the virtue of
charity. Sloth is a potential problem for human beings, because for us charity has a now-and-not-
yet character: Consider by way of analogy a married couple who say their vows on their wedding
day and therefore are married now, but who yet have to learn to live out those vows for as long as
their lives shall last.45 So too with charity: we receive the Holy Spirit both as a present reality
and as a process of becoming more and more like-natured to God, the task of a lifetime.46
Sloth, then, is resistance to the transformation that God’s love gradually works in us and
in particular the painful renunciation of the old self, that is, our willingness to let old sinful habits
and attachments die and be made new.47 The slothful person refuses to accept the demands that a
like-naturedness to God and a love relationship with her brings; she refuses the surrender and
‘putting to death’ of the old sinful self required for her own fulfillment. Sloth is thus rooted in
pride, in which we seek happiness and fulfillment not in God but in something else we have
chosen, and we seek it on our own terms, with a will resistant, not subject, to God’s.
45
ST IIaIIae.24.3.ad 2 (‘grace is nothing else than a beginning of glory in us’) and
IIaIIae.24.5, on the increase of charity. See especially ad 3: ‘This is what God does when He
increases charity, that is, He makes it to have a greater hold on the soul, and the likeness of the
Holy Spirit to be more perfectly participated by the soul.’

46
And, Aquinas might argue, more than a lifetime if one counts purgatory. Because sloth
is premised on the condition of progressive sanctification over time, angels can’t have sloth (ST
Ia.63.2)—grace in them is perfected in a single act of will.

47
Romans 12: 1-2, Ephesians 4: 22-24, Colossian 3: 9-14.
23
One Scriptural portrait of sloth is the Israelite nation facing the Promised Land.48 As
slothful, they can’t bring themselves fully to accept what their identity as God’s own people
entails, and so they hang back from the rest and fulfillment promised ‘in the land your God has
given you.’ The land is already theirs according to God’s promise, but must yet be seized by
further work and battle. When they see the challenges ahead, they too quickly revert back to the
comfortably familiar discomforts of their desert wandering, preferring them to a chance at real
rest, a chance that comes with a challenge to live fully into their identity as God’s chosen people.
So the slothful person prefers slow death by spiritual suffocation to the risks and
birthpangs of new life and spiritual growth. Hence the natural connection between sloth and
inertia or lifelessness. Garret Keizer puts the point more poetically this way: ‘Dead men throw no
fits, or it seems they wouldn’t… Death hates resurrection. No one likes to be woken from a
sound sleep. Where those afflicted by sloth … can become most angry is when someone or
something—like a dissatisfied spouse—disturbs the tranquility of their sarcophagus.’49 Why are
48
See S. Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1967), 101.
49
Garret Keizer, The Enigma of Anger (SanFrancisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002), p. 50. We
should also note the ‘trapped’ feeling of the sloth person, on Aquinas’s view—she can’t get rid
of natural desire for happiness (she can only suppress it), but she is still insistent on refusing it.
Hence his (and Evagrius’s) description of this vice as ‘oppressive.’ Keying off sloth’s two main
forms—false rest and restlessness, discussed later in the paper—Aquinas also opposes sloth to
the commandment to rest on the Sabbath day, because the slothful person turns her back on the
joy of charity and refuses to be at rest with the presence of God within her—the latter is Aquinas
24
the slothful often perceived as apathetic? Perhaps it is safer to try not to feel anything, when the
alternative is to feel the unbearable and inescapable tension that comes with refusing to be who
you really are.
We can see the main features of the historical conception of sloth from Evagrius and
Cassian in Aquinas’s account. Evagrius and Cassian agree that sloth threatens one’s commitment
to one’s spiritual vocation; likewise, Aquinas defines sloth as resisting or resenting the
indwelling of the Spirit and the supernatural love which is the root of our spiritual life and our
vocation to become like-natured to God.50
By defining sloth in terms of its opposition to the virtue of charity, Aquinas broadens
sloth’s application beyond Evagrius and Cassian’s accounts to life beyond the monastery. Now
everyone who has charity—that is, all baptized Christians, not just those who have taken
particular religious vows—is potentially susceptible to sloth. Anyone with a relationship of love
for God is now in principle capable of responding with slothful abhorrence and resistance to the
practices that draw us closer to God and affirm our identity and union with him.
In Aquinas’s account, sloth’s symptoms and effects also remain familiar. Aquinas uses
his definition of sloth as oppressive sorrow to explain its typical expression in restless activity on
the one hand, and inertia or despairing resignation on the other. Sorrow is the natural reaction to
interpretation of the commandment. Sloth, then, is our attempt at self-manufactured ‘rest’ and
fulfillment.
50
Aquinas thinks of this in terms of the perfection of the imago dei. For all these
thinkers, this spiritual vocation—being and living in communion with God—is at the core of
human identity; it is what we are meant to be and it is what brings us fulfillment.
25
a present evil which seems inescapable.51 This sort of situation leads to two typical responses,
according to Aquinas. First, through distraction and denial, we pretend the evil is not there or try
not to think about it. Second, if we cannot avoid thinking about it and we cannot get rid of it, we
become depressed, overwhelmed by helplessness, or paralyzed in despair. The first response
gives rise to restlessness, easy pleasure-seeking, and the escapist fantasies of a wandering mind;
the second, to inertia, apathy, and despair. Like Evagrius’s slothful desert anchorite, Aquinas
says the slothful person either stays busy with desperate measures to escape (either in reality or
fantasy) or slumps into despair and inactivity.
Being Lazy About Love
Our retrieval of the historical conception of sloth yielded an analysis of contemporary
tendencies to glorify diligence in our work, whether this takes a secular or sacred form.
Aquinas’s take on sloth, however, leads us to ponder slothful aversion in the context of
relationships of love. Rather than focusing on laziness—the outer symptom of sloth—we now
turn to consider contemporary forms of sloth’s inner laziness about the transformational demands
of love.
On Aquinas’s relational conception of sloth, slothful people want all the comforts of
being in a relationship—with the identity, security, love, and happiness that it brings—while
ultimately resisting or refusing to let love change them or to make demands of them. They are
51
In the treatise on the passions (making the analogy again to the will), Aquinas defines
sorrow as our response to a present evil which seems inescapable (it is present because we are
unable to escape it). See ST IaIIae.35-38 on the passion of sorrow, and ST IIaIIae.35.4, ad 1 and
2, DeMalo XI.4 on the offspring vices of sloth, which are explained in terms of not being able to
endure sorrow.
26
like a married couple who long for a relationship of unconditional love, but who chafe at the
thought of disciplining their own desires or sacrificing themselves in order to maintain that
relationship and allow it to flourish. In one of her autobiographical novels, Anne Lamott recounts
the words of a wise old woman at her church who told her, ‘the secret is that God loves us
exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this.’52 Those with sloth
object to not being able to stay the way they are. Something must die in order for the new self to
be born, and it might be an old self to which we are very attached.
In a contemporary translation of Aquinas’s relational portrait of the vice of sloth, we
would also expect to see something like spiritual sloth’s familiar symptoms: on the one hand,
resisting or averting our eyes from what loving another person really requires of us—a constant,
restless busyness, or diversions that provide escape from facing our true condition; and, on the
other hand—when we must face what we cannot bear to acknowledge: that the relationship will
require growth or change in character or it will fade and die—we find the same old inertia,
oppressiveness, and despair.
The film Groundhog Day provides a fictional, but no less truthful, analogue of Aquinas’s
relational conception of sloth.53 This film illustrates well sloth’s opposition to the transforming
demands of love, and the effects of the will’s inner resistance to this transformation. The film’s
depiction of sloth is only analogous to Aquinas’s account because it tracks a love relationship
between two human beings rather than a relationship between a human being and God.54
Nevertheless, I think Aquinas’s analysis of sloth offers a fruitful explanation of what goes
52
Operating Instructions (Ballantine Books, 1994), p. 96.
53
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. 1993, directed by Harold Ramis.
54
There is also no mention of grace—the catalyst for transformation is left mysterious.
27
wrong—and what goes right—in the film’s love relationship. Groundhog Day is a story about
one man’s resistance to the demands of love and a lesson on how that resistance can be
overcome.
In the film, the main character, big city weatherman Phil Connors (played by Bill
Murray), inexplicably gets stuck reliving the same day—February 2nd, Groundhog Day—over
and over again in the small town of Punxatawny, Pennsylvania. Once convinced he is trapped
there, smug, self-centered Phil takes advantage of his predicament by living a life of flagrant,
hedonistic self-gratification. The main project that keeps him busy in this part of the film is the
elaborate seduction of his producer, Rita (played by Andie MacDowell). Phil is attracted to Rita
because of her goodness, but he does not, indeed cannot, really love her—at least, not yet. Rather
than change his own character, he figures out what she wants and then deceptively plays the part,
working hard to put up just the right false front—quoting a line of French poetry he memorized
overnight, pretending to share her interest in world peace and her taste in ice cream—all the
while busily manipulating her into giving him what he wants from the relationship. Although she
is initially taken in by his schemes, in the end Rita sees through Phil’s selfish strategy, and
rejects his advances. ‘I can’t believe I fell for this!’ Rita cries at him in anger. ‘You don’t love
me! I could never love someone like you, Phil, because you could never love anyone but
yourself!’ Every date he masterfully engineers to her liking day after day ends with this line and
her hand slapping his face.
Rita is right—Phil cannot love anyone but himself. Although at some level he is deeply
drawn to her and wants a relationship with her, he cannot wholeheartedly commit to becoming
the sort of person capable of and committed to a real relationship of love between them. He
wants to stay the way he is. Phil wants Rita’s love but is unwilling to become the sort of
28
unselfish person who could sustain a love relationship with her. It is his old self—his selfish
sinful nature, in Aquinas’s terms—that makes a relationship of love to Rita something he yearns
for, but finds impossible to have on his own terms without any personal transformation
required. Thus Phil is also right to reply to Rita that he doesn’t even love himself. For in his
present predicament, he alone is responsible for putting obstacles in the way of his own
fulfillment—for refusing to be open to real love and its demands on him. Thus his sloth is self-
defeating in the same way that Aquinas describes—Phil stubbornly clings to his old self at the
expense of love and the fulfillment love brings. But if we need love for fulfillment, then resisting
what we need to do to be in a genuine relationship of love is to resist our own fulfillment, to
choose unhappiness. No wonder Aquinas describes sloth as a willful sorrow. And that is where
we now find Phil—in despair.
Unlike his previous busy self, Groundhog Day’s Jeopardy scene matches our
stereotypical view of slothfulness. Phil sits apathetically in the Lazy Boy recliner, mindlessly
watching a game show on television and drinking himself into oblivion. But from our knowledge
of the tradition, we realize that the previous diversionary tactics of using women for pleasure and
now this scene of resignation both count equally as expressions of sloth. In his first strategy, Phil
attempts the escapist route, and his restless need for one diversion after another attests to his lack
of peace.55 In the second scene, Phil has no alternative but to face up to his unbearable condition
but will not accept the only way out. He now realizes that he can’t have a relationship with Rita
in his current state of character, nor can he find real fulfillment outside of a relationship of
genuine love. He has run endlessly through one entertaining criminal scheme and gratifying
55
He also attempts suicide (many different ways). It’s unclear whether this best manifests
despair or a further attempt at escaping despair.
29
sexual exploit after another and found them all empty. But he also refuses to change. And so he
is at an impasse. Pinned down in a state of oppressive sorrow, he despairs.
Finally, Phil finally tries a new tactic. He attempts to change his character—to let the
demands of love transform him from selfishness to selflessless. He begins, little by little, to
become a person capable of love. Like his earlier deceptive schemes, this takes effort on his
part—he eventually earns a medical degree, he takes piano lessons day after day, he studies
French poetry, he extends a helping hand to young and old, none of whom can give anything
back. Unlike his previous stratagems, these efforts—especially his repeated attempts to save an
elderly, homeless man to whom he grows increasingly attached—gradually change his heart.
Unlike the old Phil, he is no longer bored and restless, filling time with self-centered diversions
and empty pleasures. For this time he does not merely pretend, but really becomes, not just a
poet and pianist, but a person who can and will love others. Phil is no longer motivated by the
sole desire to get what he wants in his relationship with Rita. Instead, his actions show that he
has learned to meet love’s demands and give himself up for others. In the end, his changed
character not only wins the affection of all the townspeople, but the love of Rita herself. In the
end Phil gets, not the selfish, sexual “fulfillment” he originally wanted, but real rest, both
physically (a good night’s sleep) and spiritually (contentment and joy in something analogous to
Augustine’s sense).56
If sloth were laziness, the only time Phil could be described as slothful is when he sits in
his recliner in despair, anaesthetizing himself from reality with Jim Beam and watching Jeopardy
in idle apathy. Using Aquinas’s view of relational sloth, however, we can see that Phil’s
56
As he says to Rita, ‘No matter what happens tomorrow, I’m happy now…’ This
comment meets Aquinas’s definition of joy as rest in the presence of the beloved.
30
energetic efforts to divert and gratify himself in the first half of the film are nothing but a futile
attempt to get what he wants without having to change himself. This is the same vice of sloth,
now manifested in its less obvious, busy form. As Aquinas’s account would predict, in both
forms we find the slothful Phil unhappy because he is unwilling to live with genuine, sustained
relationships of love but is unable to find fulfillment without them.
By the end of the film, Phil has overcome sloth by accepting the demands of love. What
marks his lustful attempts at seduction earlier in the film is his substitution of self-centered self-
gratification for the gift of himself in love. By the end of the film, when he has won Rita’s love,
Phil has not only discovered but has also accepted the fact that real love costs us and transforms
us. The real work sloth resists, therefore, is not mere physical effort but a change of heart—the
kind of change from the old self to the new that love demands of us, and the kind of change that
makes us capable of genuine love for others in return.
Groundhog Day can also serve as a model of therapy for the vice of sloth. How could this
be so? Evagrius and the other Desert Fathers described the various vices in order to help others
learn how to recognize them and combat them.57 So for the vice of sloth they offered not only a
57
As Cassian writes, ‘Looking at [their struggles] as in a mirror and having been taught
the causes of and the remedies for the vices by which they are troubled, [young monks] will also
learn about future contests before they occur, and they will be instructed as to how they should
watch out for them, meet them, and fight against them…As is the case with the most skilled
physicians, who not only heal present ills but also confront future ones with shrewd expertise and
forestall them with prescriptions…so also these true physicians of souls destroy, with a spiritual
conference as with some heavenly medicine, maladies of the heart just as they are about to
emerge, not allowing them to grow in the minds of the young men but disclosing to them both
31
diagnosis, but also a remedy. The remedy was perseverance, endurance, even courage. For
Evagrius, the spiritual discipline needed was called stabilitas loci—stability of place, staying put
in one’s cell.58 He said, ‘You must not abandon the cell in the time of temptations, fashioning
excuses seemingly reasonable. Rather, you must remain seated inside, exercise perseverance…
Fleeing and circumventing such struggles teaches the mind to be unskilled, cowardly, and
evasive.’59 In this discipline, the soul should mirror the body. In a nutshell, this discipline is
about not running away from what we’re called to be and do—whether through busyness at work
or through imaginative diversions. Instead, we must accept and stay committed to our true
spiritual vocation and identity, day after day, year after year, through unexciting times and
difficult ones. We must not shirk the demands of our calling, even when faithfulness and growth
pushes us beyond the comfort of the familiar.60
the causes of the passions that threaten them and the means of acquiring health’ (Institutes
I.xvii). The Desert Fathers, following the Scriptures, make clear that grace and divine power are
necessary for this; see for example II Peter 1:3ff.

58
See Eight Thoughts ch. 6: for example, ‘A light breeze bends a feeble plant; a fantasy
about a trip away drags off a person overcome with acedia,’ or ‘The spirit of acedia drives the
monk out of his cell, but the monk who possesses perseverance will ever cultivate stillness.’
59
Praktikos, VI.28.
60
This is why Aquinas said that slothful people chafe especially at the obeying the
command to rest on the Sabbath. Spiritually speaking, slothful people are resisting God’s
presence in them, not resting in that presence. But it is obvious by this point in the argument that
people can stay very busy keeping God out of their lives.
32
Applying the wisdom of the desert today, we can see why a culture of busy escapism is
spiritually dangerous: it too easily and quickly gives us a way out of this disciplined effort of
learning to love. Overcoming slothful tendencies requires us to face up to our own resistance to
the demands of our relationship to God, rather than grasping at a way out or a ready diversion
any time we start to feel stretched or uncomfortable. This is why love flourishes in a context of
lasting commitment, while sloth flourishes in a context of conveniently easy escape. As the
Desert Fathers knew, the remedy for sloth is staying the course, resisting the temptation to flee or
deny love’s demands—in mind and in body. Similarly for any human friendship or relationship
of love: there is a certain stability and endurance that sustains it, a commitment which requires us
both to submit and to stretch. Sloth prefers to stick with the selfish, easy way out.
Conclusion
Despite the differences between the traditional conception of sloth as a spiritual vice and
the common contemporary reduction of sloth to laziness, aversion to effort is a common thread
running throughout sloth’s history. What we’ve discovered is that contemporary usage usually
reduces the meaning and scope of ‘effort’ to mere physical laziness, rather than uncovering its
spiritual roots and its links to our relationships of love.
Why is it important to retrieve Aquinas’s relational notion of sloth now? Contemporary
American culture glorifies activity—both in the form of devotion to work and the constant
pursuit of entertainment. If we limit our concept of sloth to an aversion to work or physical
effort, we are apt to confuse one of sloth’s common symptoms—busy activity, even
workaholism—with virtue. Likewise, if we overlook sloth’s inner aversion to the demands of
love, we may not recognize the moral and spiritual dangers of our restless distractibility or
despairing retrenchment to our relationships. In fact, the two may even be connected, for
33
example, when we use busyness at work as an excuse to avoid facing the demands of love in our
relationships. The historical conception of sloth helps us see how both diligence and diversion
can express slothful and prideful resistance to love and its transforming power. For those looking
for an easy way out from relationships of love, both human and divine, denial and escapism have
never been more ubiquitous and convenient. To stay and face our relational identity and the
demands of our spiritual vocation takes effort. In place of our restless evasion of commitment,
then, the tradition can teach us both about the real relational work to be done and about true
spiritual rest.
With a historical perspective on sloth, we are better equipped to diagnose and remedy
self-centered resistance to the demands of love in all its current manifestations, secular or
Christian. The tradition thus invites us to hear its definition of sloth as a call not to making a
greater human effort to work harder per se, but to accept the personal transformation and serious
commitments that our loves and callings require over a lifetime.
34

Acedia's Resistance On The Demands of Love - Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

Diunggah oleh

Informasi Dokumen

Judul Asli

Hak Cipta

Format Tersedia

Bagikan dokumen Ini

Bagikan atau Tanam Dokumen

Opsi Berbagi

Apakah menurut Anda dokumen ini bermanfaat?

Apakah konten ini tidak pantas?

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Acedia's Resistance On The Demands of Love - Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

Diunggah oleh

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Forthcoming in Virtue and Their Vices, ed.

Kevin Timpe and Craig Boyd, Oxford UP

The Vice of Sloth:

Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Calvin College

sloth as ‘mere’ laziness. In the words of Evelyn Waugh,

[“Sloth”] is a mildly facetious variant of “indolence,” and indolence,

(2007). It is reprinted here with the editor’s permission.

[Pleasantville, NY: Akadine Press, 2002], p. 57).

about love than lazy about our work.

Part I: Sloth and Work

The Traditional Conception

In his colorful account of sloth, he describes it in terms of distaste, disgust, sorrow,

oppressiveness, and restlessness:

2009), for a fuller discussion of the difference.

English the vice is usually referred to as acedia, accidie, or similar variants.

kedeia, meaning ‘lack of care.’

‘carnal vices’ such as gluttony and lust.11

or drinking, sensations of sexual pleasure, money—although avarice can be a complicated case);

or rank) as their object.

unwilling to support themselves by manual labor.’13

stillness,…laziness in prayer, a slackening of ascesis, untimely drowsiness, revolving sleep’ (On

adversary of ascetic works, an opponent of perseverance,… a partaker in sorrow’ etc….

practice. (Inst. X.vii.)

Cassian’s description of physical inactivity or lack of effort is not a condemnation of

“entangles himself in worldly affairs” and displeases “him to whom he engaged

community formed by that that identity.17

poverty level of personal possessions to maintain their livelihood—e.g., basket weaving

immediately thinks of Pascal’s reflections on ‘diversion’ in his Pensees as a modern expression

or restless activity—share a common root in one’s inner restlessness and discontent.

possesses perseverance will ever cultivate stillness.’

from one thing to another, which is a kind of false or shallow activity.

A Brief History of Sloth

symptom—inertia, lethargy, lack of effort, or laziness.

As an additional complication, however, sloth’s second manifestation—restless

how this went.

The result for the vice of sloth? Josef Pieper writes:

Spark (Spring 2005), available at www.calvin.edu/publications/spark/2005/spring/sloth.htm.

Row, 1966), p. 29.

Higher Education (Sept 5, 2003; online at http://chronicle.com/article/The-5-Virtues-of-

advice to ‘work every day if possible.’

vocation, even though it is the key to her own happiness.

traditional root, pride.

developed our own prideful, ‘Christian’ version of it.

laziness’; it is no big deal to feel lazy occasionally.29

I do think it reveals the power of the ‘diligence-is-devotion’ paradigm that plenty of

phlegmatic or slow temperament…“It’s a lazy afternoon in summer” is a kind of delight, and

fidget’ (Back to Virtue, Nashville TN: Thomas Nelson, 1986, p. 155).

previous note [5].

vices altogether, a now-inexplicable remnant of a no-longer-applicable tradition. If, however, we

some healthy, perhaps countercultural Christian wisdom.

Part II: Sloth and Love

Aquinas on Sloth and Charity

the vices acedia instead of tristitia.

the Summa, he opposes covetousness or avarice to liberality (generosity), which is related to

Aquinas’s opposes it to a subsidiary virtue of courage called ‘magnanimity.’

in some way or other.

presence of the beloved, God, as illustrated in Figure 1, below:37

The virtue The principal act The effects

to Love and misericordia

Joy opposed to Sorrow (Sloth)

friendship of charity is therefore characterized by likeness: of nature—love is a natural

(sym-pathos, com-passio), which is marked by misericordia.

true for the sense appetite).